Software Architecture in Golang: Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) - YouTube

hello my name is mario welcome to another  software architecture and go video  

in today's episode i'm going to be talking about  architecture decision records also known as adrs  

so what is an architectural decision an  architectural decision is a design decision that  

address architecturally significant requirements  that are perceived as hard to make and or  

costly to change for example migrating  between different software architectures  

monolith to microservice migrating from  different data stores relational database  

nosql replacing a programming language  go to java or even thinking of  

the transport or the communication method  that you're going to be using for example grpc  

to json over http those will be decisions that  you shouldn't take like slightly lightly and you  

should be thinking well and before making them  otherwise it will be harder to go back and fix  

the problem that you introduced by making those  decisions in the first place so neil ford and  

mark richards wrote a book called fundamentals  of software architecture which i highly recommend  

is published by o'reilly and it was published in  2020 they introduced this concept of architectural  

design records that describe why those are more  important that how those are implemented and this  

is based on a gentleman that wrote came up with  this idea called michael negard and he said that  

he would like to keep a collection of records for  architecturally significant decisions that affect  

the structure non-functional characteristics  or or or or our abilities or architecture  

require attributes dependencies interfaces or  construction techniques so how can we structure  

those architecture decision records everything  begins with a title a title should be sequential  

and it has to be concrete for example adr1  migrate to the cloud it the title comes  

first next comes the status the status has  three four values which will be proposed when  

everything begins there is an accepted status  and finally there is a superseded or supersedes  

status that indicates that the current adr it  was either replacing one that already exists  

or is going to be is being replaced by another one  that is coming afterwards for example it could be  

an accepted like i said supersedes adr one  assuming then now we're talking about an adr  

two or three or whatever the case may be there is  a context and the context indicates what should  

be doing why are we doing it in the first place  for example if we take uh the initial the example  

that we when we were talking about the title and  we're thinking about migrating to the cloud well  

operating costs are too much our services are not  elastic obviously we need to give more than that  

ideally when we're writing our adr it  has to be from two from one to two pages  

not too long it doesn't have to be a book uh but  or an essay but it has to be something enough to  

make it available if we have to to probably  our stakeholders our managers or even our team  

that's really important to keep in mind next  will be a decision which cl clearly indicate  

what are we going to be doing either we're going  to be following it through with the idea that we  

originally had or we are going to be abandoning  it or what specifically we are going to be doing  

in this case again using the example of migrating  to the cloud i'm saying i i evaluated gcp azure  

and aws and we are migrating to aws because  xyz whatever decisions we we made at that point  

now what are the consequences the consequences  could be something positive negative or affecting  

our abilities a positive example will be well the  costs are going to be rules by 30 used to say a  

number the negative will be that a the databases  that that we're using is not supported by aws  

therefore we need to migrate it to whatever aws  supports and a change in the elites will be well  

the scalability now is improved because handling  auto scaling in aws is significantly easier  

now what are some tips for writing adrs the tips  that i can recommend you is you don't have to use  

a tool i'm going to be living in the description  of this video a few tools that you can use if you  

want to i personally just like to use in my editor  going directly i'm gonna define everything as as  

i need i don't use a cli or anything like that  because really it doesn't make any sense honestly  

i use markdown because markdown is a format  that you can easily convert into different  

formats like html or pdf or things like that  that you can share with other documents and maybe  

consolidate documents from different repositories  and projects and then create like a massive  

knowledge a collection of documentation that you  can share with your team or different stakeholders  

next will be keep close it to your code base what  this means is that don't create i don't know like  

a google doc for example or create a different  repository for adrs or or or things like that keep  

those together where uh whatever that describing  is part of the service for example if the service  

if if the adr is applicable to a concrete service  then add the adr to the maybe a docs folder  

or maybe a new adrs folder or an architecture  decisions folder or whatever folder you want to  

call it whatever convention your team decides to  follow and keep that together with your code base  

that way when you're committing changes you can  refer to the code to the adr specifically and when  

everything is completed and deployed to production  you can go back and say hey this adr is completed  

i'm done with it and at the same time if  anything changes if somebody new comes in  

a new team member you can this person can refer  to the documentation and therefore see the adrs  

because those are part of your code base so there  is no need to go back and forth between different  

repositories for example now use adrs as a  collaboration tool now the whole point of  

defining adrs is sure creating documentation but  the idea is that you can share these adrs from the  

beginning when they are in proposed state and then  your team can collaborate and discuss with you  

your own ideas how they perceive with the changes  that you're suggesting and maybe the improvements  

that you can make and they can suggest and and  collaborate in that way it's not something that  

you are enforcing or telling everybody hey this  is how we're going to be doing it it's more like  

hey this is how i think this could be done does  anyone have any ideas to improve what we what i  

thought and maybe i'm missing some other  things that you are maybe familiar with  

this is a great tool i use it with my team and  it works for mo format it works amazingly so  

give it a try next will be not everything needs  adrs and what that i'm trying to say is that  

obviously if you're trying to maybe the  change the column type of database table  

you don't need to create an idea that's not the  whole point this is for big remember something  

that could affect the architecture of  your system something that it could be  

costly and hard to implement or will take some  time and and something that perhaps you're not  

too familiar with so just keep that in mind  in the beginning it could be like hey do  

adrs for everything but that's not the case and  that's it thank you for watching hopefully this  

makes sense this is one of those videos where i'm  covering documentation but i think the whole point  

of defining adrs or architecture decision records  is to create sure documentation of why we decided  

to do something but also at the same time get  your team involved discuss with your stakeholders  

if needed and come up with an idea with a  plan how to improve the system that you have  

and have different eyeballs that they can  look at what you decided to do what you're  

proposing and then at the same time make sure  that everybody is on the same page everybody is  

aware of the things that google wrong and  and why we're making those decisions and  

that's it like i said thank you for watching i  will talk to you next time stay safe take care see